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Donna McLean: William, thank you for agreeing to do this interview today.
William Dalrymple: Pleasure.
Donna: What did you enjoy most about your life as a writer?
William: Being a writer is a ridiculous life. It's a great life for a layabout.
You haven't got to get up, you haven't got to go the office, if you don't want to work that day you don't have to.
It's a ridiculously nice life.
We're all very, very privileged to have it.
And what I also particularly like in my particular life is being able to oscillate between the big, heavy, serious, hard work stuff like writing
a 500-page history book every four years, and the kind of, just doing book reviews and radio shows and other stuff in between and recovering afterwards.
Donna: Explain your fascination with India and Delhi and this period of Indian history.
William: I had a very kind of sheltered childhood in rural Scotland and didn't travel a huge amount as a child.
Certainly I was the last guy in my class to go abroad.
I remember begging my mother to take me to Paris just so I could say we'd been somewhere.
My parents thought they lived in the most beautiful place in Scotland and took us for holidays in other places in Scotland and that was what we did.
So when I arrived in India it was like a kind of lightning bolt, an earthquake.
It was so totally different from anything I'd ever seen or dreamt of.
Donna: You've been involved in all forms of media - radio, television and of course, books. Which one did you enjoy most?
William: As I said, it's very nice to oscillate between them.
There's no doubt at all that the most satisfying thing to have done is a solid lump of book with a nice set of reviews on the back.
I mean that is what this is all about.
Ultimately though, reviewing radio and telly, enjoyable as they are, and journalism, are less substantial ultimately than the big prize of books.
But thank god I don't have to do books every year.
I have a cycle of about four years for a book, from conception, research and finally publication and now increasingly the whole business of publicising,
an increasingly important part of the job.
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Donna McLean: How did you engage with the primary materials and blend them into your writing?
William Dalrymple: Well, both 'White Mughals' and 'The Last Mughal' are stories of societies poised between European colonial material
and Persian and Urdu material.
With 'The Last Mughal' the Urdu and Persian material was written in Shikastah which is a very tricky form of late-Mughal scribal notation
with no diacritical marks and often written in abbreviations.
It's sort of like doing a crossword puzzle.
Even if you can fluently read a modern Urdu newspaper you're still having to fill in a lot of gaps in Shikastah
and I was assisted by two amazing scholars on the last project.
One is called Bruce Wannell, who's a Persian scholar, and the real backbone of the work of that book was done by a guy called Mahmood Farooqui
who is an amazing Urdu scholar and who poured away with very difficult stuff, particularly the stuff from the middle of the Siege of Delhi
where a lot of it is spies' reports this big on a tiny scrap of paper that's designed to be folded up and often swallowed or doesn't bear thinking
where, the history of some of this material, where it's been or where it's come from.
And you collect all of this material, you get it all in accessible form on your word processor.
You have a dateline which gradually expands as the project goes on.
By the end of 'The Last Mughal', at the end of four years' work I suppose the dateline was 150 pages long, having started off as four or five pages.
Then I use lots of card indexes, old fashioned card indexes which are invaluable.
And you have a card, ultimately thousands of cards on every one of the characters, more boxes on the different periods of the siege and chronology.
And so you end up with a huge mass of material which you have to have a way of filing in such a way that you can call it up immediately so that when
you actually come to the business of writing, that you have a system that you devised yourself whereby, you know the day of the outbreak you're
writing up, you have to have within the dateline and within the cards for that episode, references to each file where you've stored that
particular photocopy or that particular translation or which book, and know where on your bookshelves each one of these books are, so that the actual
business of writing can be done very quickly.
The sort of history I'm writing is, although there is a great deal of analysis woven into it, it is ultimately a narrative.
I'm trying to present a picture of a, quite a tightly focused period of history.
The frame for 'The Last Mughal' is 1852-1862.
It's 10 years but the great focus of it is on one nine-month siege and three quarters of the book is about those nine months.
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William Dalrymple: To tell the material, to write the material, present the material in a narrative form, which should be as engaging
to the reader as any novel.
But the difference between it and an account, say, in Tolstoy of the siege of Moscow is that you have to have documentary evidence for every statement
so you can't just say the sun was shining when Napoleon walked towards Moscow.
You have to be able to say the sun was shining as Zafar walked towards the Red Fort and put the footnote to the reference in somebody's diary
that the sun was shining that morning rather than it being a cloudy morning.
You can't, you cannot make a thing up.
Every single statement that you make has to be justified in primary resources and with both these books most sentences and
certainly every paragraph is minutely referenced.
There has been a huge growth in this sort of history writing in the last few years.
It's been happening both inside academia, people like Simon Schama's book, 'Citizens', and outside academia, people like
Antony Beevor doing Stalingrad and so on.
And you're walking a difficult line because you're trying to, in one sense, maintain very high, scholarly standards that would be comparable with any
academic work of history but you're also trying to produce a work of literature.
And there need be no contradiction, in my mind, between that.
It seems to me that it's perfectly possible to do your scholarship and your work as minutely and as thoroughly as any academic but to write it up
not in the language of post-modernism and post-colonialism and in the jargon of academe but in the language of literature and it seems to me that
this is not an impossible or even necessarily difficult thing to pull off.
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Donna McLean: Did your interpretation of the mutiny change throughout your research process?
William Dalrymple: Yes. The whole point of researching anything is that you're constantly open to the material you're producing.
So while you might go in with some suspicions that such and such an angle needs to be revised you've got to remain completely willing at every stage
to revise your own opinions.
There's no point going in with a thesis to prove, find evidence for it and then present it.
What you're doing is you're constantly re-evaluating material as more material emerges.
With this particular book, 'The Last Mughal', I had a story which on one hand was very well known.
In the Victorian period there are any number of memoirs from the British side about what happened during the Siege of Delhi and if you go to an
old-fashioned British library like the London Library in St James' Square there are a whole wall of books on the Indian Mutiny,
almost more books on the Indian Mutiny than on the rest of Indian history put together.
But no-one had ever told the Indian side of the story.
But actually it turned out that this is not the case. Certainly for Delhi, which is the main theatre of action of 1857, there is 20,000 documents
sitting in the national archives of India, an incredible sum of, amount of material, which was collected by the British and very carefully kept,
not for any altruistic or reasons of conservation or preservation.
It's because they wanted to hang anyone who appears in those documents, anyone who's in any way connected with the rebel documents and
the rebel government was apt to be killed by the British and this was part of their retribution, very consciously.
So every paper they found in the Red Fort, every paper they found in the individual Sepoy camps, the roles of attendance at police stations,
every single piece of paper has been kept in Delhi in 1857.
And far from there being no sources, it's like Pompei, it's like one city frozen at one moment of time and everyone is there.
So you have this amazingly comprehensive picture of one city over nine months.
And I can't, I think we can't have done more than about seven or eight per cent of the archive in total and yet we're overflowing with material.
It's really a ridiculously long book.
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Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
How does Dalrymple describe and justify his approach to writing history?
What approach to history do you favour? Why?
Think about one or more history books you have read during research. How would you describe the author’s approach to history?
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Donna McLean: And how would you describe your approach to history?
William Dalrymple: As I said I'm writing very much in a narrative history tradition which is a tradition that is very resurgent at the moment.
When Gibbon or Macaulay or Acton wrote history they were consciously writing the story of history.
The word 'story' is contained in the very word 'history'.
Which doesn't mean to say they weren't producing analysis.
Analysis is built into all their work of course and their theories of history is inherent in their presentation of the facts but they were
first and foremost giving a narrative of the events.
Now since the 50s, academic history writing has tended more towards analysis and the microstory and narrative went through a phase of
being regarded as rather kind of old fashioned and fuddy-duddy.
But at the end of the day, you know, people, a) like to read stories and hear what happened, and b) it lets you actually have detailed and
up-to-date versions of events, analyses kind of floating in a haze.
So I'm very much writing in the tradition of someone like Simon Schama, Antony Beevor, Linda Colley, Orlando Figes, historians in and outside academia
who are writing in the narrative tradition, but I'd say anchoring serious research in new archives, producing tonnes of new material, studying it in a
very professional manner but then choosing to write it up not in academic language but in the language of, in good prose.
And so it seems to me that for history, when you're dealing with people's lives, there's nothing in the English language which need be,
that cannot be told in good English prose.
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Donna McLean: How has your writing changed since 'In Xanadu'?
William Dalrymple: 'Xanadu' is a student book. It was written when I was 21, 22.
It's deeply embarrassing for me to read today but people tell me it gets the kind of euphoria of a student trip,
but it's very much a young man's book in every conceivable sense.
It's very naive, idealistic, light.
'Djinns' moves more towards history but it's still, it's a memoir of a place. 'From the Holy Mountain' is my big travel book.
I think it's as a good a travel book as I'll ever write and that's, in a sense I think that's my contribution,
serious contribution to travel literature.
'Age of Kali' is a collection of old odds and ends shoved together, pretending to be a book.
And then there's these two history books, 'White Mughals' and 'The Last of the Mughals', which are really a pair about the changing relationship
of the British and Indians over a period between about 1780 and 1850, when you're moving from a very multicultural world
to a racist apartheid colonial frame.
Donna: You've been categorised as a travel writer and now you're recognised as an historian. How has that been different?
William: As a travel writer you see (inaudible) in history and the history is woven in and out of all the travel books while in the two history books
there's a great deal of sense of place, particularly the place of Delhi in 'The Last Moghul' and Hyderabad in 'White Mughals'.
So it isn't, it doesn't feel like a radical change although they're classified in two different genres and
shoved into two different places in the bookshops.
Donna: Thanks for your time today, William.
William: Thank you.
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